About
Chera Hammons is a winner of the 2017 PEN Southwest Book Award through PEN Texas and the 2020 Helen C. Smith Memorial Award through the Texas Institute of Letters. She holds an MFA from Goddard College and formerly served as writer-in-residence at West Texas A&M University. Her work, which is rooted in love for the natural world, appears in Baltimore Review, Pleiades, Poetry, Rattle, The Southern Review, The Sun, The Texas Observer, and elsewhere. Her first novel is available through Torrey House Press. She has two poetry collections forthcoming: Salvage List through Belle Point Press in 2025, and Birds of America through The Dial Press in 2026. She lives on the windswept prairies of the Texas Panhandle. In her free time, she enjoys reading, birdwatching, spending time with her horses and donkeys, and caring for her houseplant collection, which is slowly but surely taking over her entire living space.
Featured Work
Maps of Injury
In Maps of Injury, Hammons threads together poems with an openhearted tenderness that turns each one into a prayer. On every page, the reader will find a reverence for the earth, as well as for all creatures, great and small, that live in Hammons’s internal and external landscapes. From joy to grief, from cow to tick, from parasite to horse, from discovery to loss, Hammons uses the beauty and tragedy of her world to say, I am trying again to learn how to live. If you want a book that will nourish the part of you that knows we are all connected, this is it. — ELENA GEORGIOU, author of Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants
